DOC: Does anyone want to go see the Reds? Will they in the future?

Cincinnati Reds manager Bryan Price (38) paces the dugout during the MLB National League game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016, at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati.(Photo: Kareem Elgazzar)

Last week, before Bryan Price got the lovely parting gifts and his team was a decent 3-12 (relatively speaking), the Reds issued a press release announcing a deal on tickets. Starting in May for the rest of the season, fans could buy a “Top 6’’ ballpark pass. A mere $29.99 a month would get you into as many Reds games as were on their schedule.

The team didn’t intend the offer to be ironic. Even if W.C. Fields would have loved it. First prize: A week of Reds tickets. Second prize: A season of Reds tickets.

Price’s firing has opened all kinds of wounds, hurts that were barely stitched to begin with. To simplify things, let’s just say this: To this point, everything the organization thought it knew about itself was wrong.

Price wasn’t the man to be caretaker for the reboot until a corner was turned. Mack Jenkins, a 52-year-old Reds lifer, was not the man to tutor fledgling pitchers. To this point, the people calling the personnel shots – scouting people to player development people to the Big Chairs at GABP – are not the men suited to lead the renaissance. I wrote this the day before Price was fired, but it bears repeating:

Right now, 12 years after he bought the team, Bob Castellini finds himself in the same spot he was in when he took over: The proprietor of a team too familiar with losing, with fans too disaffected to be mad about it.

The Reds he bought had endured five losing seasons in a row. The 2018 Reds very likely will equal that. The year that was supposed to be a corner-turner is a banana peel. This is frightening, because if this re-do doesn’t work, then what? The Reds have played their best cards. There is no Cueto to deal now.

Here’s a thought more frightening than that: What if the rebuild works, somehow, and you still don’t go to the games? If you rebuild it … they might come. And they might not.

Big attendance isn’t a given anymore, in MLB or the NFL. The Bengals live by the assumption that if they win enough to make the playoffs and lose their first game, all they have to do is open their doors and 65,000 of you will magically pass through. It doesn’t work that way anymore.

The Reds don’t make that assumption. But they operate with the notion that a winning team will be a high-drawing team. Maybe it will be. And maybe, actual attendance at Reds and Bengals games will never be what it was in the days of perpetual sellouts (Bengals had 50 or so, I believe) and 2.5 million attendance at GABP.

I can’t tell you how many e-mails I’ve gotten the past few years that started with, “I used to go to (fill in the blank) games a year …’’ Former Bengals fans send e-mails that make them sound as if they’ve been reborn. Sundays once filled with football now are spent taking drives in the country, spending time with family or reading a book.

Baseball attendance peaked in 2007, at 79 million. It has dropped ever since. Last year, it fell below 73 million for the first time since 2002. MLB is still financially robust, thanks to its digital successes. But you’re not taking yourself out to the ballpark.

Generally, millennials don’t go to many baseball games. African-Americans don’t, either. The Reds are being flanked by a minor-league soccer team. The Bengals didn’t sell out one game last season, and likely won’t this season.

The longer the Reds rebuild, the less interested you become. The longer the Bengals' intransigence, the less interested you become. Is it harder to win fans, or retain them? Both local pro teams are about to find out.

Meantime, you can go to as many Reds games as you like for 30 bucks a month. To retain your sanity, you have to love the game for the game itself, not for the way the Reds are playing it.

From the club: For full details and to purchase a Reds TOP 6 Ballpark Pass, visit reds.com/Top6.